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Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Using TeamMentor 3.4 TBot admin pages to load and sync a Library hosted on GitHub

Serge asked me to help making some changes to the TeamMentor's Asp.NET 3.5 library, and since we need a test server to look at what might be changed (and run some scripts) this is a good time to show about how to use the TeamMentor's 3.4 Tbot pages to load a Library hosted on GitHub

I will also show, how once the TM server is configured with a library using a Git url, changes can be auto committed/pushed to that Git server, every-time there is a content edition using TM's web editors.

Since we don't need all those libraries in there (and in fact we want to make changes to the .NET 3.5 Library), lets remove them all.

The easiest way to do it is to change the backend location of the TeamMentor XML files, which can easily be done by going into TBot:

... changing the TMConfig.config file XmlLibrariesPath value:

... and now, after the cache is reloaded:

... there will be no articles on this instance of TM:

TIP: If you want to quickly add a test Library to TM, you can use the old /admin panel option to install Libraries from a link or zip. Here is how I quickly installed the OWASP Library, by clicking on the OWASP link in this page:

... which makes my test TM instance now look like this:

Step 2. Create a Fork of the Target Library

In this case the TM Library I want to make changes to is the private repo tm-sme/Lib_.NET_3.5 which is the one used by SI's SME team to make changes into the next version of TM (the idea is that I will make changes in my Fork which I will then issue a Pull Request to this version)

Next, logged in as DinisCruz-Dev (which is my day-to-day GitHub not-very-privileged account), I clicked on the Fork link:

This next step is a bit different if the IIS user account of the target server is configured to use SSH, but since Azure doesn't seem to support it, we will need to use HTTPS and hardcoded passwords to do this.

The good news is that GitHub now provides a nice way to create temp hard passwords, so I can use that on this blog post :)

On the GitHub's Account Settings for the DinisCruz-Dev user:

I clicked on the Create new Token button from the Personal Access Tokens section (part the Applications area)

... entered a name for it (the text in this page provides a good explanation for how this token should be used)

... and after it was created:

... I copied it into the clipboard:

In this case it the token is 124f9ce43f8cecd7f56b2a9e412118b01f72cef7
Back in the DinisCruz-Dev/Lib_.NET_3.5 main page I clicked on copy to clipboard button that is close to the clone URL:

... which is this case is https://github.com/DinisCruz-Dev/Lib_.NET_3.5.git
Since we need to use this from the Azure instance, we need to hard-code the username and password using the syntax https://{username}:{passwordOrToken}@github.com/DinisCruz-Dev/Lib_.NET_3.5.git
... which in this case will be

... go into the Reload Server Objects, click on the Reload Cache button

... which should take a little bit (depending on the size of the Library and server-side network connection speed)

.. until a message shows up that says how many libraries and GuidanceItems/Articles exist in the current server (which means that the git clone was successful and the TM server cache was reloaded)

Opening up TeamMentor shows that we now have the new Library installed in this Azure server:

Step 4: Configuring server to auto push commit changes into GitHub
By default changes made on the server are not immediately pushed into the host server.

That behaviour can be changed by setting to true the AutoCommit_LibraryData setting from the TMConfig.config file:

Once that is set (and after a server restart or TMConfig settings reload) changes made to TM articles will be auto-commited locally and pushed to GitHub as soon as possible (i.e. there is a bit of a delay in case there are multiple edits going on at the same time).

So see this in action, lets open an article:

... click on the Edit WYISWYG link:

... and make a change to the article (see 'THIS TEST' below) and click on the Save Changes button

Once that is done, go back into the GitHub repo site, open the Commits page (https://github.com/DinisCruz-Dev/Lib_.NET_3.5/commits/master) and notice that there is an extra commit done just now (note: in TM 3.4 the commit is done under the server IIS user Git settings, which is usually not set, hence the value 'unknown user', in TM 3.6 there is already a fix to use the current TM Logged in user)

To really see the 'real time' commits and pushes, go back to the TM Article and make another change (this time around I'm using the 'Notepad' editor):

After a couple seconds from Saving the changes, another commit will exist in GitHub:

... which is made of the user changes (i.e the diff of the changes made on the TM web interface)

Bonus Feature: Quick restore of an TeamMentor website
Not sure if it obvious by now, but what we have created here is a live version of TM whose content changes are being automatically synced (i.e backed up) into an external Git repository.